Field
The present disclosure relates to location determination for mobile wireless devices. Specifically, various techniques are provided for obfuscating the locations of terrestrial wireless transceivers, including wireless access points and femtocells.
Background
Location determination for mobile wireless devices enable the current location and optionally speed and heading of a mobile wireless device to be obtained and the determined location to be provided to the wireless device (e.g., to an application running on the wireless device or to the user of the wireless device) or to some external third party.
A number of software applications, websites, and other functionalities that can be provided on or to a mobile device are beginning to use location-based services to further enhance a user's experience when using such a device. For example, a device may access a particular website, such as a restaurant review website, and the website may use information about the device's current location in order to provide location-specific content, such as reviews of nearby restaurants, to the device. Other applications and websites may, for instance, use information about a device's current location to display relevant maps to a user, provide the user with information about local businesses, provide navigation directions or inform the user of a local weather forecast or local traffic conditions. Certain applications and websites may be dedicated to providing location related content for indoor use, such as walking directions to reach a particular gate in an airport, particular store in a shopping mall or particular room in an office building. These applications and websites may rely on accurate location information for a mobile device in order to reliably provide such location content in an environment where small changes in location may have significant consequences for location related content (e.g. in terms of providing content applicable to a user who is on one side or another of a wall or on one floor versus another floor of a multi-floor building or just inside or just outside of a building).
By having more accurate location determination, more location-appropriate functionality and/or information can be provided to the user. To help enable accurate location based services (e.g. in an indoor environment), a mobile device may be provided (e.g. by a network location server) with the known locations for various wireless access points (APs), base stations and/or femtocells that are nearby to the mobile device and whose radio signals can be received and measured by the mobile device to enable the mobile device to estimate its own location. Examples of problems with provision of accurate AP, base station and femtocell locations in a vendor competitive and/or operator competitive environment to all mobile devices include providing costly or sensitive positioning information to mobile devices from competitors, to mobile devices associated with other service providers, to mobile devices whose users have not enrolled in an appropriate program, to mobile devices whose vendors have not agreed to a privacy agreement, or to mobile devices whose users have not paid a subscription fee. There may be privacy and security issues where the venue owner may not want everyone to know the locations of the femtocells and access points in the venue. It may be preferred (e.g. by the provider of the AP, base station and femtocell location data) that only certain mobile devices (e.g. mobile devices whose home operator or vendor has a business relationship with the location data provider) receive the full benefit of this accurate location data. In addition, other location providers (e.g., location providers associated with non-preferred mobile devices) may be able to collect and use the accurate location data to populate their own database with the collected AP, base station and femtocell locations and make use of this stored data at a later time to provide a rival location service to that offered by the original provider of this accurate location data.